I didn’t ask them who they voted for, where they came from, or if they went to church on this Sunday morning. Because weren’t we all actually in one, a church, as we hiked the trails of the Catalina State Park? Right down to the organ pipes of the Saguaro cactus. 

They wanted me to take a picture of their group, with the mountain and the cactus, and their accomplishment of the hike. We only knew each other because we shared the same dusty earth. And wasn’t that enough? Enough for them to easily hand over their phones to me, a stranger, yet at the end of the same path. We smiled under the same brilliant sun, perhaps all wishing it could always be this way, and we walked with a bit of the prayer still clinging to our shoes.

I played no music on this hike. I listened only to the sounds of my feet in the gravel. It could have been on VanDyke Road, or in Aix en provence. I smiled. The warmth of their phones still clinging to my palms, and the words of John Lennon ringing in my head, “…I am not the only one…”.